I think I woke up this morning with a chocolate hangover. However the molten lava chocolate cakes were AWESOME and totally worth the sugar crash.

I sent out the address book. If you ‘d like to add more information to your entry (like birthday or something) e-mail me that information I’ll send out the address book again later this week or early next week.

And my birthday gift to myself? A color photo printer. I can’t wait to start playing with it! Think about all the awesome flower pr0n I can now share with non-geek friends!

As previously noted, our Saturday was busy, and two unexpected events ended up making it even more so.

Susan is here for a weekend visit, because she came in for the retirement party for one of her professors. She was gone to the party most of the day, so I was thinking I’d get some things done during the day.

No, not really.

On the way to the grocery story, I asked Michael if he wanted to stop by Best Buy and look around.

We ended up buying Michael’s (early) birthday gift.

It was clearance time for laptops. And for the model Michael liked best he was available to grab the floor model for an even bigger discount. I tried to tell him that we’d have to put the laptop away for a month until it was really his birthday, but as you can see he was having none of that.

By the time we finally got home from shopping, Grandmom was starting to wonder what had happened to us, since we said we were going to take her to the pharmacy to get her prescriptions.

Just as we’re getting ready to leave, there’s a knock at the door, and it’s my brother!

So he visited for the afternoon and evening (Michael kept running out of the room to check the updates on his new computer.)

Pretty awesome Saturday, ‘eh?

What is the coolest starship?

OK, so, I’ve actually had this discussion with myself. Let us say no more about that.

My biggest problem is that they are missing all kinds of ships. No Moya from Farscape. No Star Furies from Babylon 5. And most importantly, no Defiant from DS9. How are we supposed to determine the coolest starship when they have all these gaping holes in their poll?

Jeesh!

Oh, my ranking for coolest ships?

Defiant
Moya
Serenity
Millennium Falcon
Nebuchadnezzar

Here are some interesting news items that have come in under the radar in recent weeks.

First, something I have complained repeatedly about, which is “anti-bacterial” products. Research in the UK has found that using anti-bacterial wipes in hospitals does not, in fact kill bacteria, and if a wipe is used on more than one surface, may instead spread those bacteria.

…the wipes tested were unable to kill the bacteria that they removed. As a result, they transferred high numbers of bacteria to other surfaces.

On a more controversial note, a study conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin found that states that conduct local background checks, as opposed to relying upon only federal, or federal and state data, have lower rates of homicide and suicide. This was a retrospective study, and the article didn’t list the states used in the study, which is information I would like to know before drawing further conclusions from the article. (i.e. did the study account for population density and size?)

An article that was simply fascinating was the the following:

A new report shows that a non-ambulatory (unable to walk or stand) child with a cervical spinal cord injury was able to restore basic walking function after intensive locomotor training. The case study, published in Physical Therapy (May 2008), the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA), evaluated the effects of locomotor training in a 4 ½ year-old-boy, who had no ability to walk following a gunshot wound sixteen months earlier.

The articles doesn’t state at what age plasticity stops, although it does limit these ability to children. It would be interesting to know what biological mechanisms affected this child’s miraculous recovery, and whether those conditions can eventually be reproduced in adults.

A study performed at Ohio State University has found that in the workplace instant messaging can actually improve productivity. I’ve noticed this myself. I’d much rather have the GAs IM me easy questions than call me. And it would be much easier to IM my boss questions that require little more than yes or no answers than call him or get up and walk over to his office.

Although it’s probably better for my physically to walk over to his office with my questions.

And last but not least, something that won’t surprise women in the least, heterosexual men’s decision making is more suspect after they’ve seen scantily clad women, or items in which women would be scantily clad.

Authors … found that the desire for immediate rewards increased in men who touched bras, looked at pictures of beautiful women, or watched video clips of young women in bikinis running through a park.

Um… duh? Isn’t that the point of all those horrible TV commercials?

Of course this could also work in the favor of women. Drag one’s guy through Victoria’s secret, and maybe they’ll more readily agree to any purchases immediately after.

…but back at work.

Trying to get caught up with the scheduling.

Except when I’m sitting here at the front desk. Then I’m not so much with the working, since I’m sitting here waiting to be interrupted.

Because I was already in a bad mood, I decided to poke at the css on my splash page for my site.

(It may get technical from here, so if you don’t give a rat’s patootie about web design, just go admire my splash page, look at some of the book pages, and then come back and lie to me and tell me how lovely they are.)

First, I discovered that when I first created the page I made things harder on myself than I needed to. This was fixed, and so the next revamp should be a tad easier, primarily if I make further layout changes involving the menus. (Instead of placing all the menu items in a single box and just moving that, I was moving each item individually, figuring out each time how much each box had to move. This was… annoying.)

Second, I really truly deeply despise Internet Explorer. I’ve known since I first created my css menus that they wouldn’t work with IE. So I just made sure that the main menus would allow people to access a page from which they could visit the other pages. Not a problem, and no one would know what they were missing unless they’d first looked at the page in a real browser.

My book pages are a bit more problematic. If you visit my fantasy page in any browser except IE (or a really old browser like Netscape 4) you get the nice css menus at the top of the page. Now I admit that the font size of the css menus is off in Safari, but they at least they work. When IE7 came out, I thought that some of these problems would be fixed.

No. My css menus still don’t work properly in IE7, and to add insult to injury, on the splash page they work a tiny bit, in that the sub menus appear, but you can’t actually select any choice other than the top.

And then there’s the fact that the links footer, which is simply a box within a box, doesn’t layout properly in IE6. Even though I’m not even doing anything strange with the code there.

All of which is just maddening. I don’t really want to make an IE only version of my front page, but if it’s going to look half-assed, I don’t see as how I have much choice.

So, like I said: I hate IE. And I wish I had the power to make the computers of Bill Gates and every other jackass who maintains IE EXPLODE with just the power of my mind.

I’m sure that would make me feel much better.

Now I think I need to go eat chocolate ice cream or something.

I’m going to be insanely busy at work for the next couple weeks. We’ve got a new software package, and I’ve got a month to learn it and write the documentation.

In theory, it’s interesting, but what I’ve noticed mostly is that it runs really slowly, which could be a problem. We’ll see.

But mostly, I’m all but counting the hours–it’s finals week, and students are already leaving, and so soon we’ll actually be able to drive around town. Woo!

HA!

I just discovered something that makes my life much easier. Microsoft added “Conditional Comments” into their browsers, so I can do all the cool CSS stuff I want, and then just have a boring page that doesn’t use the cool stuff that IE (and only IE) doesn’t support.

Simply create a style sheet only for IE, that doesn’t have all the neat code supported by every other browser out there, then the following code (where IEsucks.css is the name of your less cool style sheet) to the head section of your HTML page:

<!–[if IE]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”IEsucks.css” />
<![endif]–>

That’s it! I can now use fixed positioning with impunity! MUAHAHAHA!

(See here for what I can do if I get to ignore IE not following the rules.)

ADDENDUM the First:
Get comment code doesn’t show up when you post it. Funny that.

(sigh)

Code is now fixed and visible.

Internet Explorer sucks.

I’ve been tweaking my site over the past couple days, and it has renewed my absolute hatred for Internet Explorer, and through it, Microsoft. Why? Because Microsoft can’t be bothered to follow the w3c‘s guidelines and standards.

I primarily write my code by hand. I’ll use Dreamweaver to simplify tasks involving content, but when it comes to layout I always work with the code, be it for HTML, CSS, or php. (Different web design languages.) Thus, I know that I am following web standards, because I’m writing the code myself (and, I admit, I have multiple reference books I check to make sure I’m writing things correctly.)

What ticks me off is when I write correct code, and IE ignores it.

Here is the front page for my website. I created pure CSS menus that appear when you place your mouse over an option. (Starting with the Cats option there are no menu options to appear, so it’s not broken.) This hover menu works in Firefox, Seamonkey, Netscape, Safari, and IE7. But not IE6. (I think they worked in Opera, but I no longer have Opera installed on any of my computers.) When I saw that this was fixed for IE7, I was delighted, thinking that Microsoft was finally going to follow web standards, especially when I discovered that IE7 also supports fixed positioning (see here for an example).

But no, I was wrong, IE7 still doesn’t follow all web standards. So the menus in all my book pages work in Safari, Netscape, Firefox, Seamonkey (and I think Opera) but not IE6 or IE7. Considering the amount of work I put into creating and maintaining those menus, this really irks me.

And, I discovered yesterday, that IE still screws up layout; I’m assuming it’s still rendering margins incorrectly. So I had to tweak a perfectly constructed layout, to fix the fact that IE was overlapping layers.

So it’s not the products per se that bug me, but Microsoft’s arrogance in refusing to follow the web standards used by every other web browser. So whoever is behind that monumentally bad idea has best stay out of my way, or I’ll kick them soundly in the shins.

OK, I admit I am picky about text readability, because it’s one of the things I focus upon in my web design class: If you want someone to read something, white on black or black on white are the easiest combinations to read, because they have the highest contrast.

This dialog box, however, is a pretty good example of what not to do.

Dear Geeks,

Let me remind you of something important: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING!

No, really! I’m not kidding! I’ve got two computers I’m trying to set up in my office that we can use for tutoring sessions, and my ex-officemate NEVER WROTE DOWN THE PASSWORDS he used to set them up.

And he didn’t use the passwords we use for everything else. So one system I had the help desk come down and hack to reset the Admin password, the other I’m reinstalling Windows XP on. Which involved much crawling around on the floor, which I don’t really find that thrilling.

So really, document everything. And then make sure your co-workers have copies of that documentation.

Because making me crawl around on the floor and run the quarter mile between my office and the help desk multiple doesn’t make me incredibly happy.

This ends todays public service announcement.

This geeky.

(more…)

In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m a huge fan of Firefox. It’s my web browser of choice, and I was converted after having used Mozilla for several years. (I also have Sea Monkey, IE 6, and Safari installed on this computer, but I like Firefox best.)

One of the things I’ve grown to adore are the extensions.

All my computers have the L33T KEY extension (convert text to ROT 13 on the fly!), Forecast Fox, IE Tab, Fire FTP, Tab Mix Plus, and Notifiers for Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

But there are some others that are just fun. I just installed Firesomething, and now my browser is called Mozilla Thunderpig. Yesterday it was Firebadger I think. It accomplished nothing other than making me smile when I look at the title bar. I also found the xkcd extension that allows you to read the longer xkcd titles, which, oddly enough, is precisely why I was searching the extensions in the first place.

I’m about to upgrade Word Press.

If you notice any weirdness? It’s probably coming inherent to this site. Just sit back and not-Sophie will take care of you in a minute.

ADDENDUM THE FIRST:
Easy-peasy!

ADDENDUM the Second:
$#@($* comments don’t work

ADDENDUM the Third:
Michael is my favoritest husband in the Whole Wide World!